Louis Damani Jones
Looking back, the seeds of my spiritual life have been present from a young age. My mother, father, and godparents were the founders of an intentional community for people experiencing homelessness, formerly incarcerated, and living with HIV called Stand Up Harlem in Manhattan. Though it was a kind of “spiritual but not religious” organization, it was deeply influenced by the spirituality of the Emmaus Movement, a movement founded in France by the Catholic priest Abbe Pierre to combat homelessness and poverty. I was born while my parents lived in that community, and that ethos had an impact on me that I would only come to appreciate when I was older. Soon after birth, I was moved to the St. Louis metro area where I spent the majority of my life. In elementary school, I was tangentially connected to the Church – attended Catholic school and received the sacraments there. However, I never was deeply catechized or spent any time talking about faith outside of school. I moved to a public school during middle school and began to drift even further from a faith foundation.
I began to also more deeply embrace a spirit of activism. The first protest I remember was around the age of 12 in New York City at the United Nations, protesting the lack of action on behalf of the U.N. in fulfilling their promise to end AIDS globally. Throughout high school, I continued to volunteer with organizations like Planned Parenthood as a “Teen Advocate for Sexual Health” and other adjacent organizations working in the world of birth control, HIV/AIDS, etc. I was also engaged in the high school party world and everything that comes along with that.
Fast forwarding to 2014, I had recently finished work with a civic engagement project called Chicago Votes. I was back in the St. Louis area when I heard about the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, a place about a few minutes from where I lived throughout elementary school. Soon after, I was out on the streets on various nights and days throughout the week with the protestors. I eventually ended up being trained by an organization called Organization for Black Struggle in their Next Revolution fellowship program. During my time with them, I met some more organizers in the St. Louis area who were looking to start an intentional cooperative community for organizers to live and work out of in North St. Louis. I ended up joining that project soon after the house was purchased.
While I was working on the activist house project, I began to experience God calling me. There had been stirrings earlier in different ways – reading books like the Bhagavad Gita, Quran, new age texts, Book of Mormon, the Cloud of Unknowing, even reading certain books of the Bible at times – but all those engagements were fleeting. During this period, which was extremely intense with all of the energy on Ferguson, God drew me to reading the Bible even more frequently, listening to songs and hymns on YouTube, etc. Eventually, I came across an Orthodox chant while looking to listen to the psalms. The Orthodox chant struck me as extremely powerful, and I felt the Holy Spirit was present in the chanting of the monks. To make a super long story short, I ended up joining the Coptic Orthodox Church and found myself immersed in an apostolic Church with a super rich cultural heritage. I got my first spiritual father, an Egyptian priest who I still owe my life to. I learned about the early church fathers, monasticism, fasting, liturgy, and living a prayer rule. That communion maintains the seven-layer ordination system, and I was tonsured and ordained a Reader in the Coptic Orthodox Church, growing even more deeply into the love of liturgy, Coptic hymns, and Orthodox spirituality. During this time I also worked with an organization called In Defense of Christians attempting to build awareness for the needs of Christians in the Middle East and also helped to organize the St. Louis area Poor People’s Campaign protest at the Missouri statehouse.
One turning point moment back towards Catholicism came as I was in an English language Bible study at the Coptic Orthodox Church with an Ethiopian deacon. Someone asked a question about the ability to receive communion at a Catholic Church, which we strongly condemned. Something in me felt somewhat unsettled, however, and I began to look even more deeply into the theological differences between oriental orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, and catholic churches. At the end of that process, I found myself thoroughly convinced that either Eastern Orthodoxy or Catholicism was correct based on the conciliar views on the nature of Christ. It was through engaging the Second Vatican Council that I began to see that Catholicism was the Church that I needed to belong to.
I ended up fully returning to Catholic practice in 2018. During that time, I was deeply struck by Catholic social doctrine which explained a Gospel-oriented perspective on issues ranging from the family to politics to economics and more. I got involved with a lot of organizations in the Catholic world looking to live this tradition out in various ways – Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Charities, Catholic Urban Programs, and many others. Pope Benedict taught that revelation purifies and exalts reason, and that has continued to be my experience throughout my ongoing conversion. Catholic social doctrine is an answer to so many of the ideological divisions, confusions, and falsehoods throughout our society.